What is Intelligent
Design?

Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence.

-- William A. Dembski

Design theoryalso called design or the design argumentis
the view that nature shows tangible signs of having been designed by a preexisting
intelligence. It has been around, in one form or another, since the time of ancient
Greece.

The most famous version of the design argument can be found in the work of
theologian William Paley, who in 1802 proposed his "watchmaker" thesis.
His reasoning went like this:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone,
and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that,
for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever. ... But suppose
I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch
happened to be in that place; I should hardly think the answer which I had before
given [would be sufficient].[1]

To the contrary, the fine coordination of all its parts would force us to conclude
that

the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed,
at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed
it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its
construction, and designed its use. [2]

Paley argued that we can draw the same conclusion about many natural objects,
such as the eye. Just as a watchs parts are all perfectly adapted for the purpose
of telling time, the parts of an eye are all perfectly adapted for the purpose
of seeing. In each case, Paley argued, we discern the marks of an intelligent
designer.

Although Paleys basic notion was sound, and influenced thinkers for decades,
Paley never provided a rigorous standard for detecting design in nature. Detecting
design depended on such vague standards as being able to discern an objects
"purpose." Moreover, Paley and other "natural theologians"
tried to reason from the facts of nature to the existence of a wise and benevolent
God.

All of these things made design an easy target for Charles Darwin when he proposed
his theory of evolution. Whereas Paley saw a finely-balanced world attesting
to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to natures imperfections and brutishness.
Although Darwin had once been an admirer of Paley, Darwins own observations
and experiencesespecially the cruel, lingering death of his 9-year-old daughter
Annie in 1850destroyed whatever belief he had in a just and moral universe.

Following the triumph of Darwins theory, design theory was all but banished
from biology. Since the 1980s, however, advances in biology have convinced a
new generation of scholars that Darwins theory was inadequate to account for
the sheer complexity of living things. These scholarschemists, biologists,
mathematicians and philosophers of sciencebegan to reconsider design theory.
They formulated a new view of design that avoids the pitfalls of previous versions.

Called intelligent design (ID), to distinguish it from earlier versions
of design theory (as well as from the naturalistic use of the term design),
this new approach is more modest than its predecessors. Rather than trying to
infer Gods existence or character from the natural world, it simply claims
"that intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich
structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable."
[3]